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Why The Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point In Western History - Hardcover

Klinghoffer, David

 
9780385510219: Why The Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point In Western History
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385510217 ISBN 13: 9780385510219
Verlag: Doubleday, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

The scholar-author of The Discovery of God looks at the historical debate over Judaism's regjection of claims for Jesus's divinity, explaining why Jewish elders condemned Jesus because of his unorthodox interpretations of the law and arguing the schism between Judaism and Christianity arose not from a rejection of Jesus but from a rejection of Paul. 35,000 first printing.Reprint.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID KLINGHOFFER is the author of The Lord Will Gather Me In, a memoir of Jewish conversion, and The Discovery of God, a spiritual biography of Abraham. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Aus dem Klappentext

The age-old debate about Jewish culpability in the death of Christ was seemingly put to rest. The recent furor surrounding Mel Gibson s The Passion of the Christ, however, has reopened the wound, and many fear that it will undermine a century of Jewish-Christian dialogue. David Klinghoffer brings a fresh perspective to the claims and counterclaims in this authoritative reexamination of the origin of the controversy and its impact on history.

Far from denying the role Jews played in the crucifixion, Klinghoffer provides ample evidence that Jewish sages accepted full responsibility for it. Exposed to many would-be messiahs, the Jews of Palestine regarded Jesus with a sense of curiosity tempered by understandable skepticism. Opposition to him arose not in response to his rebellious activities but to his individualistic, often unorthodox, interpretations of the law. According to Biblical prophesies, the coming of the Messiah would be marked by a series of specific events, including the gathering of exiles, the return of a Davidic king, and the reconstruction of the Temple. Because none of these events occurred during Jesus lifetime, Klinghoffer argues, the judgment against Jesus by Jewish elders was natural and inevitable. In condemning Jesus, they were upholding a basic tenet of their religion: the belief that no man could interpret the Torah on his own authority.

The Jerusalem Church established by Jesus followers remained a wholly Jewish movement. In a persuasive, groundbreaking conclusion, Klinghoffer shows that the schism between Judaism and Christianity was a result not of the Jewish rejection of Jesus but of the rejection of Paul. Claiming that Christ transcended the written Torah, Paul s preachings clearly represented a new religion one that would spread throughout Europe and change the course of history.

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chapter one


Before Christ
Judaism in the Year 27


One of the curious things about Mel Gibson's Jesus movie, The Passion of the Christ, is the part the Jewish priestly establishment, headquartered in the Jerusalem Temple, plays in arresting Jesus and turning him over to the Romans. As viewers, we are supposed to be moved by this to personal repentance, recognizing our own sinfulness in the act of betrayal and violence. But the villainy of Gibson's Jews is hard to recognize because it makes no obvious sense. We are intended to believe the Temple priests are after Jesus because of a big dangerous following that's going to crown him Messiah, but nowhere in the film do these massively numbered followers ever make an appearance. From all the evidence of The Passion, you would think Jesus had about ten disciples, twenty maximum. So why were certain Jews so intent on seeing him dead? Gibson leaves us with no clear idea.

Much the same difficulty is posed by the Gospels themselves. From a straightforward contemplation of the text, it is not immediately clear what gets the Jews who object to Jesus so worked up. If we try to read the Gospels together, imagining them as forming a single integrated story (to the extent possible, since they are marked by disagreements as to narrative detail), we find the Jews mounting an emotional staircase leading from initial warmth, to puzzlement and perplexity, to distress, to self-righteous annoyance, and finally to a murderous rage.

When Jesus begins his ministry around the year 28, teaching in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth, the congregation at first "spoke well of him, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded from out of his mouth."(1) Then, on hearing more of his preaching, "all in the synagogue were filled with wrath."(2) Other Jews, however, were moved to follow him, and on one occasion his disciples and others stood about as he sat on a mountain—the Sermon on the Mount—at which "the crowds were astonished . . . for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes."(3) The Pharisees, a Jewish faction whom we'll meet shortly, get wind of the interest and controversy Jesus is stirring up. They "murmur against his disciples," who are judged to be morally unsuitable.(4) When these self-righteous Jews find him overseeing the disciples, who are plucking grain in seeming violation of the Sabbath, "the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him."(5) When Jesus heals a man on a Sabbath, the same Jews again "went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him."(6) When Jesus seeks to justify himself, citing the authority of God, his "Father," then "the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God."(7)

We need to step back from our assumptions about the Gospel text. Through familiarity with the general story line—we all know Jesus had detractors among his fellow Jews—we tend to assume it was only natural that small-minded bigots would take offense at this spiritually uplifted, transcendent being. But if you try to imagine reading about the Jewish reaction to Jesus without bringing to bear the cultural background of Christianity, you'll see that, as one might say of characters in a novel, the outrage of Jesus's fellow Jews seems distinctly undermotivated. They want to kill him because he healed a man by faith on the Sabbath—something in itself that Jewish law does not forbid? Or because he called God his "Father"—when God is called "Father" of the Jewish people and of their kings many times in scripture and liturgy? What's the big deal?

In the next chapter, we'll see what reasons the Jews would really have had for turning away from, or against, Jesus. In the chapter after that, we'll address the question of whether or not they can be justly accused of having him killed. For now, we need to understand who those Jews actually were. Pharisees? Herodians? What do these names denote? When "the Jews" finally succeed in having Jesus arrested and brought to trial, his persecutors are described as priests and elders. It's impossible to understand how, at this initial stage, the Jews would actually have perceived Jesus without first having a sense of their context--historical and religious. We need to clarify how, historically, the Jewish people got to where they were in the year 27, the year before Jesus started his preaching career. And we need to know what their religion taught them to believe on four key points of special relevance to Jesus and his teachings.


The overall reception of Jesus among those who knew of him—doubt turning to outright hostility—was only in keeping with a general Jewish tendency evident in the nation's past. The Jews are an acidic people, inclined to debate and question. Their inherent, inherited skepticism may account for the fact that among ancient peoples they were the first to successfully critique and forever pull away from the dominant polytheism of their world. Jewish literature, preeminently the Bible, scorns the inadequate beliefs and customs of other peoples, though not limiting its thoroughgoing critique to non-Jews. On the contrary, in Hebrew scripture, the Jews themselves come in for the roughest treatment—their moral and other intellectual failings are held up for withering scrutiny. In short, as Jesus discovered if he didn't already know it, any claim you place before the Jews will be savagely critiqued. Of all the insults that their enemies through the millennia have leveled at the Jews, one thing they have never been accused of being is credulous.

Yet at the same time, they were not nihilists or cynics. With them, certain beliefs remained constants. It has been suggested that an indication of Judaism's plausibility as an account of God and man is this fact: that a skeptical people have nevertheless retained an unbroken tradition of faith in central doctrines. Strikingly, their belief system relied on an account of mass revelation. Jewish history begins at Mount Sinai, by traditional calculation in the year 1312 BCE. At Sinai, says the Bible, God spoke to some two million Jews. There is no record of dissent among the Jews, in any generation until very recently, on this basic point. The Jewish contemporaries of Jesus agreed that Torah—a word designating the first five books of the Bible but also a vast explanatory tradition—was received at Sinai by the children of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was this same "teaching" (which is what Torah literally means) that the Jews carried with them through history. They still possessed it in the year 27.

Let us, then, briefly review Jewish history from this perspective--as a narrative of the polarity between creed and critique, skepticism and secure knowledge.

Who were the people who gathered at Sinai to become the first Jews? Before the event of Sinai, there were no Jews per se. For it is the acceptance of the Torah that defines the Jewish people, in much the same way the publishing of the Declaration of Independence defines the American nation—so that before 1776, there were no Americans. Centuries before Sinai, God had made a covenant with Abraham, who by tradition was born in 1812 BCE. The patriarchal family under his grandson Jacob lived in the land of Canaan but went down to Pharaoh's kingdom initially to escape a famine and ended up dwelling there as slaves. After leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah at Sinai as free men, they resettled in Canaan.

There, Jacob's descendants finally established their own kingdom, that of King David and his son...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385510217
ISBN 13 
9780385510219
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
247
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Doubleday
https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/

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